When we took the hardtop off the Land Rover last year we scratched the body and I finally got around to buying some touch-up paint. A local auto parts place has a gizmo called a spectrophotometer. According to the parts guy the thing cost $15,000! I can’t confirm that. I can tell you it didn’t help him match the color worth a shit. Plan B is to go back to the guys who repaired the tornado damage. They got the color exactly right.
Hattie rides up front. That’s non-negotiable. So Riley has to ride in the back and she doesn’t like it. And she’s only there because she is leashed to the spare tire and cannot climb up front.
Doesn’t seem that long ago (April 29) we took the hardtop off the Land Rover and replaced it with the soft-top. We carefully stowed the hardtop in a storage unit where not quite a month later a tornado banged the shit out of it (and a bunch of other stuff in Jefferson City). More photos.
It’s still warm enough for the soft-top but the mornings are getting cool so I decided to put the hardtop back on and today some pals showed up to help.
L-R: Me, Benjamin and John Middleton, George Kopp, Andrew and Ben Lear.
There are some beautiful places in Missouri but one of my favorites is the Prairie Garden Trust, managed by my friend Henry and his wife Lorna. I’ve posted about it here many times.
Henry and I usually walk but today we took the Land Rover. (The hot, dry summer made it safe to drive on the prairie without leaving ruts.) Henry took us to some spots where we got to engage the four-wheel drive (low range!) and the truck performed beautifully.
Spotted a new leak on the truck and reached out to my friend (and Land Rover expert) John Middleton:
Common place for them to leak. Rear transfer case output shaft seal. May need a speedy sleeve on the the output flange. The flange nut also might be loose. Eventually you will get oil on the parking brake shoes. All of mine have leaked or still leak there. If it stops leaking it means the transfer case has run out of oil!
Very hard to find a Land Rover that does not drip some oil. As the tappet brothers proclaimed: “The British were not successful in the computer industry because they could not figure out how to make one that leaked oil.”
Took the Land Rover to Poettgen Automotive for oil change and service. Owner Dan Poettgen has experience with foreign vehicles and seemed the obvious choice to work on the Land Rover (since my buddy George’s shop got wiped out by a tornado). During his inspection he noticed a leak from the “oil pressure sending unit” and removed it to look for the cause.
Following some phone calls and online research, Dan determined the unit wasn’t installed properly. While waiting for the replacement part, Dan has me running with a unit from a 1977 Chevy Caprice! It works and has stopped the leak.
This little gizmo monitors oil pressure and sends info to a gauge and a tiny green light in the instrument panel. No idea why the Santana Land Rover folks use a green light to indicate low oil pressure. (I have to get in the habit of watching oil pressure more closely.)
In just over two weeks I will have been driving the truck for a full year. Next project: a little body work on the hard-top to repair tornado damage. Hoping to keep the soft top on through September.
We live at the end of a gravel road so the Land Rover gets dusty fast, especially with the soft top. I hosed it out today and tightened up some screws and nuts. The truck is held together with hundreds of the things and the bumpy road shakes them loose. I try to find them before they fall out. I do love this truck.
Back in May a tornado hit Jefferson City and did a lot of damage, including the storage unit where I housed the top to my Land Rover. I replaced a couple of broken windows but had to order a new top to the driver side door.
A local body shop did a fine job of matching the paint but when when I first looked at the old and new top side-by-side, it looked like the angles (see curved arrow) were different. Then I noticed the right side (see red line) of the old window wasn’t square.
Makes sense now because the old top got hammered hard enough to bend the steel (straight arrow). So we’re good to go. My buddy George has taken a hard line on getting the top of the Rover a make-over, too, so that’s next. Hoping I can make it though September — maybe a bit longer — with the soft top.
It’s not uncommon to find a screw or a bolt in the floor of the Land Rover. The truck has some serious vibration and stuff comes loose and falls out. Easy enough to put back if you can find where it came from.
I love this about the old Land Rovers. You can see — and get to — just about every nut, bolt and screw.
Most of the damage to the Land Rover hardtop is easily repaired but the frame around the driver-side window got buggered boogered up and it was going to be difficult to straighten so I purchased a replacement.
It just slots into the bottom of the door with a couple of bolts. Good as new once I get it painted. I continue to marvel at the simplicity of the Series Land Rovers. I can think of nothing analogous in modern vehicles.